Blog Posts

Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America invites submissions for a special issue focused on the topic of Children’s Dictionaries, edited by Susan Rennie. Children’s dictionaries have a long history within the practice of lexicography, from Renaissance dictionaries compiled to aid the learning of Latin to the latest dictionary apps designed for use in schools. In content and style they are enormously varied, ranging from pedagogical dictionaries written for classroom use to whimsical glossaries of words in children’s fiction; and they span a wide age range from first word books and picture dictionaries to dictionaries aimed at high-school students. A children’s dictionary is very different to an adult dictionary of the same size and headword count; and decisions over which words are allowed into, or excluded from, children’s dictionaries can be emotive. More weight may be given to words used in fiction, and less to slang and current buzzwords. Definitions and usage examples will reflect the experience of children rather than grown-ups;...

The Nominating Committee and Executive Board are pleased to present the 2021 DSNA ballot for electing new Board officers, new Fellows, and voting on new Amendments to our Code of Regulations. You can access the ballot at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DSNA21. Voting is limited to members of the DSNA in good standing. The ballot will remain open until April 17, 2021. This ballot features quite a number of items, so please click through each page of the ballot and vote in all three sections. The ballot is introduced and explained in a letter by President Elizabeth Knowles. We will announce the results of the ballot at our Biennial Business Meeting on May 21, 2021, at noon EDT (US). A link to the Business Meeting will be sent out to our members a week prior to the meeting. Thank you for your participation! ...

At the request of some DSNA members, the Conference Committee for DSNA 23 has extended the CFP deadline to March 12, 2021. You can submit your abstract (no papers, please) for the DSNA 23 virtual conference at https://easychair.org/cfp/dsna23. And if you have any questions, please contact the office. ...

The Spring 2021 Newsletter is now available under the tab Newsletters. ...

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We have changed with how we process member payments. Due to steep increases in the fees that PayPal and WildApricot charge us to process payments, we have decided to switch payment platforms and save money there rather that pass those increases along to our members. This means that all automatic renewals currently in our system will have to be cancelled and reinstated on the new payment platform. We know this is a hassle, and will remind you when we send our our standard renewal letter that you will need to sign up for automatic renewals once more this year. If you have any questions about this, email the office at dsnaadmin@gmail.com and we'll help get your renewal sorted. ...

DSNA 23. President Elizabeth Knowles and the DSNA executive board are pleased to announce that DSNA's 23rd biennial meeting will take place virtually on Friday, June 4th, 2021. Save the date for an exciting meeting, different in structure from previous DSNA biennials! Further details to come soon. DSNA 24. To maintain DSNA's history of meeting in odd-numbered years, the meeting previously scheduled for 2021 at the University of Colorado, Boulder will instead take place in 2023 at that university. ...

In honor of Dictionary Day (October 16--also Noah Webster's birthday) here is the cover image for a book edited by Sarah Ogilvie published this week. The book is dedicated to Madeline Kripke. The link below will take you to a Word file containing the table of contents. https://dictionarysociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/The-Cambridge-Companion-to-English-Dictionaries.docx ...

17 ELEXIS partners are constantly developing and improving ELEXIS tools and services for lexicography. https://elex.is/tools-and-services/ We are constantly enriching our resources to enable smart research not only for lexicographers and researches in Natural Language Processing, but also for teachers and other professionals without formal training in lexicography. And what better way to start off a new school year than with newly developed resources? Below, you can find a comprehensive overview of all open-access resources that are currently available. The newest ones are listed first, but you can find a quick list of all resources right here: OneClick DictionaryClustyNAISCElexifierVerbAtlasSyntagNetSketchEngineLexonomyElexifinderLexicographic newsfeed ...

The Executive Board of DSNA is delighted to announce that Lynne Murphy has been appointed as the next Editor of Dictionaries, to take over the role when Ed Finegan steps down next year. Lynne is an accomplished lexicologist and theoretical semanticist, the author of Semantic Relations and the Lexicon (Cambridge UP, 2003) and Lexical Meaning (Cambridge UP, 2010), as well as co-author of Key Terms in Semantics (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Antonyms in English (Cambridge, 2012). She is also author of the extremely popular The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship between American and British English (Penguin, 2018), written with support of a very competitive National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for public-facing scholarship. She is the Lynneguist behind the blog, Separated by a Common Language. She has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Baylor University, and the University of Sussex, and has been a member of DSNA at least since 1992, when she was studying for her Ph.D. with Ladislav Zgusta at the University of Illinois. Lynne’s scholarly sophistication and command of style,...